Maximal Orders in the Design of Dense Space-Time Lattice Codes

In this paper, we construct explicit rate-one, full-diversity, geometrically dense matrix lattices with large, nonvanishing determinants (NVDs) for four transmit antenna multiple-input–single-output (MISO) space-time (ST) applications. The constructions are based on the theory of rings of algebraic integers and related subrings of the Hamiltonian quaternions and can be extended to a larger number of Tx antennas. The usage of ideals guarantees an NVD larger than one and an easy way to present the exact proofs for the minimum determinants. The idea of finding denser sublattices within a given division algebra is then generalized to a multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) case with an arbitrary number of Tx antennas by using the theory of cyclic division algebras (CDAs) and maximal orders. It is also shown that the explicit constructions in this paper all have a simple decoding method based on sphere decoding. Related to the decoding complexity, the notion of sensitivity is introduced, and experimental evidence indicating a connection between sensitivity, decoding complexity, and performance is provided. Simulations in a quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel show that our dense quaternionic constructions outperform both the earlier rectangular lattices and the rotated quasi-orthogonal ABBA lattice as well as the diagonal algebraic space-time (DAST) lattice. We also show that our quaternionic lattice is better than the DAST lattice in terms of the diversity-multiplexing gain tradeoff (DMT).